Fear of Society

To start off…our society sucks. People expect far too much from us and they don’t understand how much it hurts and how badly so many of us try to fit in.

The project/fear that stuck out to me the most was Michele Vaughn’s fear of society’s judgements. She had a difficult time opening up about this, but I was so proud of how well she spoke about it. She teared up and I totally understand, but nonetheless she was brave enough to come to class and speak about a topic that many people around the World face. Society always puts tall and skinny girls in front of us and tells us that’s what we should look like, when in reality that is sickening and horrible. It’s because of our stuck up society that we have so many girls with low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, etc.  Michele made a good point about how you can’t control genes.  If a human was born a bigger size than most, it’s not like they can help it. It was part of their genes and that’s that.

The reason why this stood out to me so much was because I’ve always been against bullying and the society.  It’s just not okay for a bunch of people to tell someone that they are too “fat” or label them as anything before actually getting to know them.  Although it is in our nature to judge someone before actually meeting them.  I have never been bullied myself, thankfully, but I have seen it happen before and I can’t fathom how much it disgusts me.  How can someone be so cruel to someone that is JUST LIKE THEM! I mean, God created us all differently, but we are still human beings, all with the same feelings. As the years go by, the newer generations are becoming worse and worse with bullying and judging. Something has got to be done about this, because that is just no way to live.  Most people hurt themselves because of our inhumane society.

This issue/fear definitely makes me second guess my fear. In a way, my fear and her fear go together. The fear of judgement correlates to the fear of rejection in that if I make a video and send it with my portfolio for a job opening and the company ends up rejecting me, then I’ll feel like total crap. My self esteem will be low and then i’ll be afraid that they judged me and thought I wasn’t perfect enough for their company. They wouldn’t have given me a chance because my video just didn’t cut it.  I feel like both rejection and judgement are two of my biggest fears in life. I don’t want someone to reject me because they judged me before getting to know who I really am.  I feel like that’s how my whole life has been, honestly and I wish I could’ve talked about that during class. Not many people give me the time of day because they think I’m weird, too hyper, too happy all the time.  Well, in reality, i’m just a human like everyone else.

I say, if you’re weird, crazy, or believe in something or do something that goes against what society thinks is “right” or “perfect” then embrace it.  Don’t let them see you down, because once they know you feel bad about yourself, they will come in and destroy you and turn you into something you’re not.

Society can not control us…and once we can all accept that, this World can finally be weird, original, out of the ordinary, and it’ll be perfect.

Paramount Internship, Whaaaat?

For my fear assignment, I wanted to get over the fact that i’m always so afraid of taking risks because I think people will instantly reject me and then that leads to me having low self-esteem. So to get over this I wanted to apply for an internship with Paramount Pictures considering they are my favorite studios in the World. Their requirements were simple: be a junior/senior, attend college, and it’s preferred to have some experience in Film.  I had about one and a half of those requirements so I said “what the heck, why not!” I applied but when it came to hitting the button, I just could not get myself to do it….so like any other college student, I had my mom click it for me. Afterwards, I stressed about what they would say or how they would react for a week.  I ended up receiving a letter saying “We appreciate the interest, but unfortunately you aren’t a good candidate” and that really hurt my feelings.

However, I realized that it was better that they at least acknowledged my existence rather than pushing me to the side with the rest of the applicants. After presenting this to the class, I noticed a lot of people were actually surprised of what I did and what I received; exactly what I had expected. The feedback I got was very helpful too with one student telling me to look at the positive side of this fear assignment where at least they didn’t say no. And that’s very true, at least they didn’t reject me without telling me.  Beth seemed to be interested in the letter I had received, along with some others in the class and that made me happy that they were doing exactly what I had expected them to do.

I honestly thought about changing my fear assignment to not including the letter and not even mentioning the letter to anyone and keeping it to myself, but then I realized that since I didn’t actually take screen shots of my application, that the class and Beth wouldn’t actually believe me. I spazzed out during the presentation because I was nervous and I didn’t mention a lot of things I said up above. I wanted to talk about how much rejection really affects me. It basically keeps me from being adventurous and taking risks and I’m afraid that this will keep me from obtaining a decent job for my future and actually living my life.

I’m just happy people reacted the way they reacted because despite the rejection letter I had received, the fact that my classmates seemed interested and happy for me made up for it.

What is fear?

The word itself scares me. I mean why does Fear have to exist?

Anyways….

I’m excited and scared to present my experiment to the class. I just hope my classmates react the way I’m thinking they will. As soon as I get to the point of my experiment/what I created, I feel like a lot of the students will gasp or have a shocked face.  I don’t think they’ll be expecting what I’ll be doing.

I’m pretty sure they’re going to either be jealous for what i’ve done or they’ll be happy for me. Either way, I definitely expect a lot of them to be surprised because it’s just not something realistic to happen to any human being.

It’s a 1 in a million.

WtBleep?

I’m going to be very honest here and just admit that I got nothing out of the movie we watched. Half the time they were saying so much that I just couldn’t retain the info and I’d get easily distracted.  I do remember one of the men they interviewed said that the average human being gets distracted 6 to 10 times per minute.

Well for myself, I get distracted 20 times per minute. I just have trouble focusing and that’s exactly what happened during the film. I do also remember them saying something about us perceiving reality or what not and I just don’t understand that. What does Quantum Physics have to do with how we perceive reality and such?! I just didn’t understand most of the video; it could have been because I got distracted a lot or I’m just not that easily amused or interested in that kind of stuff. They got really in depth and I just got lost.

The cartoony animations were pretty neat, but I just didn’t like the fact that I didn’t understand the film.

Class Takeaway 11-11-13

I noticed that what worked for me, didn’t work for someone else in the classroom.  I like making lists because they help me keep my things together. I’m so hyper and crazy that lists usually keep me on track and not go all ADHD. Normally lists also help me be creative in a way because then my thoughts are on one thing and not all over the place. When they go everywhere, I start to stress out and can’t think.

However, what works for me doesn’t work for someone else such as Beth Lykins. She hates lists and keeping things in that type of format. She likes to be all over the place because that’s what helps HER be creative.  I don’t know how she can handle that but it works for her.

I knew that what would work for me wouldn’t work for someone else, but I never knew that the creative side had to do something with it. For my Vision Board project, I chose to make a Bucket “List” and sure enough, I actually had the best time and the most creative time with it.  For future references I’ll use lists during projects and see how creative I can get when I focus only on one thing at a time.

Bucket List

Creating a vision board isn’t always easy. Any time I think about my future, It brings lots of stress on me. I don’t know what will happen in 10 or 20 years. I don’t even know what will happen in the next hour. When I think of Vision Boards I think of a big poster board with different photos and words of my future plans. I don’t think many people follow their vision boards, however, because all the thing is is a poster board with photos. It’s not like it’s something that you can actually accomplish. It’s just things that you WISH would happen, not things that WILL happen.

A vision board could be a good thing in the fact it holds your dreams and future goals you WISH to accomplish. It’s bad, however, because most people just look at the board and don’t do anything about it. That’s why I didn’t make the traditional Vision Board…I put my own twist on things and created a Bucket List.

I chose to do a bucket list because I like having my life in order. I like making lists and following the things on them. I especially love putting check marks on the things i’ve done. It makes me feel much more accomplished.  I started off with the what if question “What if I can’t obtain my dream job?” and that dream job would be landing a position with Paramount Pictures.

I started off with getting the typical poster board and bought some of those stick on letters.  I brainstormed what I wanted in life and how I could get to my dream job and I landed about 10 reasons/goals I wanted to make happen. It was a mess trying to find all the letters so since I didn’t have all the black, I added the glittery ones to make the board a little weird like my personality.

 

I finally figured it out and I cut the list down to about 7 things starting with the easiest step/goal in my life to the most “challenging” goal. But it turned out great and I can’t wait to put it on my wall and check mark the things on it as I go about my life.

Too Much NOISE!

The one thing that truly stood out to me after discussion in class was the fact that 80% of the class was so similar. Almost all of them said they can’t work without having some type of noise in the background. I found that peculiar because I honestly expected most of the people in that class to be very introverted and hate noise.

I was wrong and I’m glad I was because It’s great to be in a class with similar people to bounce off ideas from. They get each other, yet most of their ideas are different from each others. It’s a confusing thing but I just thought it was fascinating.  Never judge a book by its cover….which is a bad habit I have yet to break.

I judged almost everybody in that class before I even got to know them. I like that we are similar in the fact that most of us need noise to be able to concentrate. Whether that noise is people speaking in the background or music, it’s noise none the less and it helps.

For the bliss assignment…everyone did their own thing, yet it seemed that when most of the people explained their “happy place” and such, almost always the response was that they either liked music playing in the background, liked to be in the middle of a crowd, or have people talking.

So different yet so similar.

Class Take Away 7

October 21, 2013 is the day a professor gave us permission to go off next week and do WHATEVER we wanted in 3 hours, instead of showing up for class.  I pinched myself to see if I was in a dream or not. No teacher in their right minds would tell any student to go do WHATEVER they wanted, illegal or legal, unless your name is Beth Lykins.

That is why I love this class. Today made me feel happier than usual. Going into that class is like my escape route from the annoying human world. The fact that she told us to go do something that makes us happy made me love her and the class even more, because I’ve always had one thing in my head that makes me happy. I will attempt to do it in those allotted 3 hours and hope that creativity comes rushing out.

When I’m in a happy state of mind, all these wonderful thoughts come to me and with those I can get creative. In a normal situation where i’m in the real world, surrounded by human beings all day every day, nothing comes to my mind expect for old memories and evil thoughts. I’m hoping when I get to my happy place, I’ll be creative enough for the rest of the semester.

Leading by Example

Being a leader isn’t just fun and games. It takes skill, ambition, honesty, trust, bravery, and diligence.  I was partnered with Michelle who said that people described her as a “Leader” because she takes on that role with the many activities she does. I think someone’s identity is very important when trying to tell people apart. Two people can be the same thing, but they are also different in the way they do that thing. Michelle isn’t the only one who’s considered a “leader”. There’s the Queen of England, Hitler, The President of the United States of America,  and so forth. Public roles is different than identity.  An identity describes someone, but a public role is what that person wants the rest of the world to see.  If a stranger talks to me and I tell them I’m a soccer player…that’s all they’re going to see me as.  They don’t know the rest of my life and who I am. I show them what I want to show them, hence “public role”.

Public role also goes with perception.  People perceive others as something that they’re not or they perceive them as a small part of who they are.  Michelle is black skinned and that’s most likely the first thing people perceive her as. They don’t know her personally, but they see her as a black skinned person.

So for this project…I took the world “Leader” and brainstormed ideas. It took me two weeks plus my best friend’s help until we got the idea of having a crown on a hill with different colored people kneeling down and bowing their heads to that crown underneath. The crown symbolizes the leader (Michelle) and the pink rhinestones symbolize her favorite color.  The different colored people symbolize her efforts in helping everyone around the World, not just one specific race/kind.  Some of the bodies are a tad different in size to symbolize the difference in everyone.  There’s not ONE person who is the same as the other.

We first started off by taking a poster board and cutting pieces then taping them down to the inside of the shoe box to make the hill. Unfortunately it took up most of the inside of the box and looked like a squared hill, so we tried something else.

We took three different colored green clay and made a really tiny hill and put it in the middle. The only problem was that the crown was too big so I improvised and put it around the so called “hill” and made it seem like the “leader” was protecting and serving the population/the World (the green hill).

 

I glued some blue craft paper for the sky and some gray to the ground for the grass. Then my friend took some black clay and made a tiny person kneeling down to the crown.  Then I took brown colored clay and made the same thing and did the same with white clay. I didn’t want to limit myself to only ONE color because in today’s World/generation, everyone is equal (or so they should be).  She is a leader to many different and unique people. None of my clay figures are the exact same. They are each different in shape and color.

 

The finished project looks like this with different, awkward looking people bowing down to their leader, their helper, and most importantly their friend.

Class take away 6

Something stood out to me last week: everybody’s reactions to the projects people brought to class.

After Beth told us to watch each other’s reactions as each person was presenting, I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by how amazing it was that almost everybody in the room was captivated by each project.

It’s just amazing how human beings are just inherently curious. If a person sees a box laying on the floor, he or she will immediately want to know what’s inside. It’s just what we do.  You can’t stop being curious, it’s just not right.  As the phrase goes, “curiosity killed the cat” and I couldn’t agree more.

When one of the student’s project came to Beth (a box filled with something I can not reveal), she passed like it was no big deal.  I don’t understand how she could contain her curiosity because I was dying inside for her to open it and just take a small peek.  Curiosity was killing me inside when the first few people all had brought boxes in to class and I couldn’t look inside until class begun.

After each person went, the people who hadn’t seen the projects yet would lean in to their chairs to try and get a closer look of the other sides’ projects. It was actually funny to observe the curiosity happen because everyone was doing almost the same thing.